LV101 and enoughisenough, see https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-death-rates-higher-republicans-democrats-why-rcna50883 (the article is called "Covid death rates are higher among Republicans than Democrats, mounting evidence shows: Lower vaccination rates among Republicans could explain the partisan gap, but some researchers say mask use and social distancing were bigger factors"). It says the following.
"Average excess death rates in Florida and Ohio were 76% higher among Republicans than Democrats from March 2020 to December 2021, according to a working paper released last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Excess deaths refers to deaths above what would be anticipated based on historical trends.
A study in June published in Health Affairs similarly found that counties with a Republican majority had a greater share of Covid deaths through October 2021, relative to majority-Democratic counties.
... The Yale researchers behind the new working paper say vaccine hesitancy among Republicans may be the biggest culprit.
"In counties where a large share of the population is getting vaccinated, we see a much smaller gap between Republicans and Democrats," said Jacob Wallace, an author of that study and an assistant professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health.
Indeed, his paper found that the partisan gap in the deaths widened from April to December 2021, after all adults became eligible for Covid vaccines. Excess death rates in Florida and Ohio were 153% higher among Republicans than Democrats during that time, the paper showed.
"We really don’t see a big divide until after vaccines became widely available in our two states," Wallace said.
But the June study suggested that Covid vaccine uptake explained just 10% of the partisan gap in the deaths. Those researchers suggested that compliance with other public health measures such as mask use and social distancing was a significant factor."
See also https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-in-republican-counties-have-higher-death-rates-than-those-in-democratic-counties/ (the article is called "People in Republican Counties Have Higher Death Rates Than Those in Democratic Counties: A growing mortality gap between Republican and Democratic areas may largely stem from policy choices"). it says the following.
'During the COVID-19 pandemic, the link between politics and health became glaringly obvious. Democrat-leaning “blue” states were more likely to enact mask requirements and vaccine and social distancing mandates. Republican-leaning “red” states were much more resistant to health measures. The consequences of those differences emerged by the end of 2020, when rates of hospitalization and death from COVID rose in conservative counties and dropped in liberal ones. That divergence continued through 2021, when vaccines became widely available. And although the highly transmissible Omicron variant narrowed the gap in infection rates, hospitalization and death rates, which are dramatically reduced by vaccines, remain higher in Republican-leaning parts of the country.
... In a study published in June in The BMJ, Warraich and his colleagues showed that over the two decades prior to the pandemic, there was a growing gap in mortality rates for residents of Republican and Democratic counties across the U.S. In 2001, the study’s starting point, the risk of death among red and blue counties (as defined by the results of presidential elections) was similar. Overall, the U.S. mortality rate has decreased in the nearly two decades since then (albeit not as much as in most other high-income countries). But the improvement for those living in Republican counties by 2019 was half that of those in Democratic counties—11 percent lower versus 22 percent lower.
.. The new study, conducted by researchers in Texas, Missouri, Massachusetts and Pakistan, covers the years 2001 through 2019 and examines age-adjusted mortality rates—the number of deaths per 100,000 people each year—from the top 10 leading causes of death, as recorded in 2019. These include heart disease, cancer, lung disease, unintentional injuries and suicide. The researchers then analyzed county-level results in each of the five presidential elections that took place during their study period, identifying counties as Republican or Democratic for the subsequent four years. They found the gap in mortality rates between Republican and Democratic counties increased for nine out of 10 causes of death. (The gap for cerebrovascular disease, which includes stroke and aneurysms, remained but narrowed.) Political environment, the authors suggest in the paper, is a “core determinant of health.”
... And an analysis of the new study’s data by subgroups supports the idea that individual choices play a role. Hispanic Americans everywhere saw significant improvements in their risk of death. Black Americans still have the highest mortality rates of any racial group, but they saw relatively similar improvement. “It didn’t really matter where they lived,” Warraich says. For white Americans, however, the difference was profound—a fourfold increase in the mortality gap between those living in Republican and Democratic areas.
... In the intervening decades liberal states enacted more policies to address health concerns while conservative states went in the opposite direction, with inflection points in the early 1980s 1994 and 2010. Montez notes that those dates line up with Ronald Reagan’s election as U.S. president, Newt Gingrich’s control of Congress and the rise of Tea Party politics. Political affiliation drives social policies and spending, says Lois Lee, a pediatric emergency physician at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Conservatives tend to see health as a matter of individual responsibility and to prefer less government intervention. Liberals often promote the role of government to implement regulations to protect health. The Democratic approach has included expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Access to health care and having health insurance are important for well-being, Warraich says. Democrats also spend more on what are known as the social determinants of health. “We know things like your housing situation, your socioeconomic status, your access to healthy foods and healthy lifestyles, as well as exposure to toxic stress—all these things affect your overall physical as well as emotional and mental health,” Lee says.
Several kinds of policies—around tobacco, labor laws, the environment and guns—repeatedly emerge as significant. “Each party has bundled multiple policies together,” Montez says. In Mississippi, for example, there are no statewide clean indoor air policies restricting smoking in bars, restaurants or workplaces, Montez says. In California, on the other hand, smoking is restricted in all three environments. Cigarette taxes also differ dramatically. “The places where you can’t smoke indoors are also the places where cigarettes cost a lot,” Montez says.
... Cultural differences between red and blue counties also likely contributed to COVID deaths. “You’re affected by your neighbors,” says Neil Sehgal, a public health professor at the University of Maryland and co-author of a recent study of the association between COVID mortality and county-level voting. Sehgal and his colleagues found that through October 2021, majority-Republican counties experienced 72.9 additional deaths per 100,000 people relative to majority-Democratic counties. To the researchers’ surprise, however, vaccine uptake explained only 10 percent of the difference. The finding suggests that differences in COVID outcomes are driven by a combination of factors, including the likelihood of, say, engaging in unmasked social events or in-person dining, Sehgal says. By February 2022 the COVID death rate in all counties Donald Trump won in the 2020 presidential election was substantially higher than in counties that Joe Biden won—326 deaths per 100,000 people versus 258. “COVID was probably the most dramatic example I’ve seen in my career of the influence of policy choices on health outcomes,” Woolf says.'